Resisting Black Erasure: Raciolinguistic Perspectives and Critical Translanguaging in Bilingual Classrooms

• In Event: Disrupting the Language of Power: Translanguaging, Whiteness, and Educational Futures

Abstract

Objectives

Research has documented the ways in which classroom learning shapes student identity and their understandings of the world. Within bilingual education, raciolinguistics has been used to surface the ways in which racialization impacts access and experience. As such, scholars have used raciolinguistics perspectives to challenge hegemonic presentations as well as teaching and learning approaches. However, there remains a need to expand raciolinguistics into content delivery. As such, this paper calls for a centering not only of Black language but also Black history, linked to the geographies, places and peoples students are tied to.

Theoretical Perspective(s)

Grounded in a critical disability raciolinguistic (CDR) perspective this paper, positions translanguaging as a liberatory practice that challenges dominant language ideologies and affirms the lived experiences of multilingual students, and argues that immigrant students must be equipped to understand the racial context of the United States in order to critically engage with how race and language intersect in schools. Without this foundation, even well-meaning bilingual education can reproduce racial and linguistic hierarchies.

Methods/Modes of Inquiry
Drawing on narrative interviews with self-identified Black Latines and textual analysis, this paper explores how educators can cultivate multilingual spaces that foster racial literacy, critical awareness, and collective agency. Emerging from Black feminist thought, a CDR perspective informs our attention to embodied knowledge, resistance to domination, and the political dimensions of language use.

Scholarly Significance

Rather than treating multilingualism as a technical skill or accommodation, we must recognize it as central to the broader struggle for educational justice. This paper offers both theoretical insights and practical strategies for transforming bilingual classrooms into spaces where students not only learn across languages—but also across temporal and geographic systems of power.

Connection to Conference Theme

This paper directly engages the theme by “unforgetting” Black histories and the lived experiences of Black Latine students, while imagining liberatory futures for bilingual education. It constructs a new vision for education research by bridging historical and geographic consciousness with raciolinguistic and disability justice frameworks, positioning multilingual education as a transformative force in dismantling systemic inequities in schools.

Author

• María Cioe-Pena, University of Pennsylvania